Resident Evil Village PC version crack appears to fix performance issues
A new crack for the PC version of Resident Evil Village seems to fix the performance issues associated with killing zombies, for example. The crackmaker claims that developer Capcom and Denuvo’s copy protections were the problem.
“All the in-game stuttering like killing a zombie has been fixed because Capcom’s entry points have been stripped , so most of their functions are never performed again,” crack maker Empress told the crack’s .nfo. “What makes it worse is that Capcom DRM was completely hidden in Denuvo’s vm , so things turned even slower.”
The problems with the stutter were already raised around the release by Digital Foundry, among others, who explained it in a video. These also indicate significant performance issues when the player encounters the witches, who are surrounded by a swarm of bats. Those performance issues also seem to have been resolved.
Several parties have put it to the test and claim that the crack does indeed improve performance. That includes channels on YouTube, as well as John Papadopoulos from Dark Side of Gaming .
Crack seems to introduce another problem
A downside of the crack seems to be that certain animations, where the drm presumably performs its checks, seem to have been removed completely. Respondents on a piracy website point to another comparison video where one of the witches grabs the player character in all kinds of ways in the regular version and mainly stares at the player in the cracked version. It is not known how many animations are missing. Note that the performance in that video cannot simply be compared because the video maker uses two different GPU driver versions.
That Denuvo and other copy protections negatively affect the performance of the games they protect is not new. For example, an extensive benchmark session of the YouTube channel Overlord Gaming already showed this in 2018.
That channel also noted that a crack won’t necessarily improve a game’s performance, while a developer’s own removal of Denuvo has a much higher chance of doing so. Resident Evil Village and Empress’s crack seem to be the exception, with the snag in the form of the missing animations. Perhaps Capcom now has the crack, removes the copy protection itself, which happens more often with Denuvo.
Update, Wednesday, July 14: Digital Foundry has a video dedicated to the situation. They confirm that the crack fixes the performance issues and state that using RE Framework , a mod framework for this game among others, can help bring back missing animations.